The term social robot or sociable robot was coined by Aude Billard and Kerstin Dautenhahn (Billard & Dautenhahn, 1997; Fong et al., 2003) and Cynthia Breazeal (2002). The field of social robotics concentrates on the development and design of robots which interact socially with humans, but sociality between robots (e.g., in multirobot systems) is not part of the field. We can distinguish between a weak and a strong approach in social robotics. While the strong approach wants to “evolve” robots which have the capabilities to display social and emotional behavior, the weak approach investigates in the imitation of social and emotional behavior only. Social robots need to show the “human social” characteristics like the expression of emotions, the ability to conduct high-level dialogue, to learn, to develop personality, to use natural cues, and to develop social competencies (Breazeal, 2002; Fong et al., 2003; Weber, 2005b). Pioneers and leading researchers in this field are Cynthia Breazeal, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Aude Billard, Frederic Kaplan, among others. In the last years, the term Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) became more prominent than that of “social robotics.”
Published in Chapter:
Human-Robot Interaction
Jutta Weber (Technical University Carolo Wilhelmina of Brunswick, Germany)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 13
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-863-5.ch061
Abstract
Some people regard the personal mobile robot as a candidate for the next digital revolution as it might become a future ubiquitous tool and everyday partner of humans. This new “socio-emotional” robot is supposed to conduct dialogue, to develop social competencies and to support users in everyday life. In this chapter, I sketch out the epistemological, ontological and techno-material groundings of personal service robotics which is based on new models of human-machine interaction like caregiver-infant or pet-owner. I discuss the conversational paradigm in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) with its problematic concepts of “pre-given” social mechanisms, uninformed users as well as its new understanding of sociality as service.